Discovery
and Early Exploration, ca. 1000 - 1550

Some Introductory
Remarks

The broad outlines of the history of trans-Atlantic European voyages of
exploration and discovery have been well known for decades. In terms of Newfoundland
history, the principal figures for which sufficient evidence exists to give them
historical validity include the medieval Norse, followed a few centuries later by John
Cabot, the Corte-Real brothers, and Jacques Cartier. Unfortunately, the caution with which
historians approach these earlier voyagers is thrown to the wind by many who would like to
sensationalize the past by "proving" that Europeans frequently, if not
regularly, crossed the Atlantic, not only long before Cabot but also long before the
Norse. In The Brendan Voyage (London: Hutchinson, 1978), Tim Severin describes his
attempt in a modern version of a curragh to show that Brendan, the medieval Irish monk and
saint, could have sailed to North America centuries before the Norse. Alas, the book
proves only that Severin does not lack for courage. Those who would like to believe in the
voyages of St. Brendan, or the twelfth-century Prince Madoc, or any other fanciful
forerunners of the demonstrable voyagers and discoverers, should first read either Stuart
C. Brown, "Far Other Worlds and Other Seas: The Context of Claims for Pre-Columbian
European Contact with North America," Newfoundland Studies IX: 2(Fall 1993):
235-259, Robert McGhee, "Northern Approaches; Before Columbus: Early European
Visitors To the Shores of the `New World'," The Beaver LXXII: 3(June-July
1992): 6-23, or Alan F. Williams, "Sailor Saints, Northmen and Princes: European
Lights on the Sea of Darkness," in Iona Bulgin (ed.), Cabot and His World
Symposium June 1997: Papers and Presentations (St. John's: Newfoundland Historical
Society, 1999), 49-62. There are, of course, a considerable number of reliable studies of
European voyages of discovery in the North Atlantic in general, and with chapters on
Newfoundland in particular. For many years, one of the better general introductions
was The European
Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)
by Samuel Eliot Morison. He combined the inquiring mind of the scholar with the nautical
skills of the sailor to present convincing analyses of all of the major voyages of
exploration which brought Europeans to Newfoundland. A more recent recent contribution to the literature is Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting,
and Discovery of the New World (New York: Basic Books, 2006) by Brian Fagan,
an anthropologist who worked his way through a vast number of secondary
sources in order to identify the many factors that came together in the
fifteenth century to make the so-called Age of Discovery possible – capital,
knowledge, shipbuilding, consumer demands, and so forth.

The Norse

The
first demonstrable example of European contact with North America -- at least,
one for which conclusive evidence exists -- was that of the medieval Norse. Their
trans-Atlantic experience was part of a larger expansion out of their
Scandinavian homeland, a point that can be better understood by reading James H.
Barrett, "Rounding Up the Usual Suspects: Causation and the Viking Age
Diaspora," in Atholl Anderson, James Barrett, Katie Boyle (eds.), The Global
Origins and Development of Seafaring (Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, 2010), pp. 289-302. For our purposes, this "Reader's
Guide" will focus on the Norse experience in North America, yet right from the
start, the student is challenged both by how massive the literature on that
subject is, and how difficult it can be to separate the reliable from the
fanciful. For example, Tryggvi Oleson's Early Voyages and Northern Approaches
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963), was the first volume in the publisher's "Canadian Centenary Series" and should have been
a strong entry to what became a very good series on Canadian history. Instead,
and notwithstanding a wealth of detail and painstaking effort to validate its
conclusions, Oleson pushed a very questionable thesis, that the Thule people
were the product of an intermarriage between Norse and Dorset Eskimo Culture, a
thesis that has never gained significant acceptance within the academic
community. Oleson made the same argument in an otherwise excellent article on
"The Northern Approaches to Canada," co-authored with W.L. Morton, DCB,
I: 16-21 (incidentally, the
DCB is now on-line).
Yet even when students seek assistance from essays such as David Quinn's "Review
Essay -- Norse America: Reports and Reassessments," Journal of American
Studies XXII: 2 (1988): 269-273, the fact remains that new research is
constantly being published, leaving essays like Quinn's quickly out-dated.

The year 2000 saw a number of
events marking the millennium of the Norse arrival in North America, and with
those events came a number of excellent publications. Two in particular stand
out. To coincide with a Smithsonian Institution exhibition marking the Norse
millennium, the museum published Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, edited
by William Fitzhugh and Elizabeth I. Ward (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 2000). In Canada, the Viking Millennium International
Symposium, which opened in St. John's and then shifted to L'Anse aux Meadows,
resulted in Vinland Revisited: The Norse World at the Turn of the First
Millennium, edited by Shannon Lewis-Simpson (St. John's: Historic Sites
Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003), a selection of nearly forty
papers presented at the Symposium. Both volumes provide numerous readable and
engaging, yet scholarly, essays; a number will be cited in the paragraphs that
follow.

By now readers may have noticed that I prefer to refer to
these medieval Europeans as “the Norse” rather than as “Vikings.” Strictly
speaking, the word “Viking” should refer to those who engaged in violent raids
throughout various parts of northern Europe, while “Norse” is a more appropriate
term when referring to the expansion across the North Atlantic of Nordic peoples
who settled in Iceland, Greenland and elsewhere. All this occurred in what can
properly be referred to as the “Viking Age.” However, defining just who these
people were, how they should be identified, and perhaps most importantly, how
they perceived themselves is not an easy task, and should therefore be
considered before proceeding any further. Were they Norwegians, Icelanders, Greenlanders, or just Norsemen? In
“How Did the Norsemen in Greenland See Themselves? Some Reflections on ‘Viking
Identity’,” Journal of the North Atlantic, II (2009-2010), “Special
Volume: Norse Greenland – Selected Papers from the Hvalsey Conference 2008,”
131-137, Anne-Sofie Gräslund maintains that, in the context of Viking identity,
we can contrast two possibilities: 1) that there was an overarching Scandinavian
cultural unity in the Viking Age, or 2) that there were distinct cultural
identities in different parts of what is often called the “Viking world.” In
fact these options are not mutually exclusive; both could easily be true and
probably are. In “The Ethnicity of the Vinelanders,” also inJournal of the North Atlantic, II (2009-2010), “Special Volume: Norse
Greenland – Selected Papers from the Hvalsey Conference 2008,” 126-130, Gunnar
Karlsson focuses more specifically on the people who eventually came to
“Vineland”; after providing a short study of the ethnic identities of Icelanders
and Norwegians in the Viking Age, he presents an analysis which suggests that
they did in fact have a double ethnic identity, a Greenlandic and a Norse one.

For those seeking a succinct, digestible overview of
the Norse experience in the medieval North Atlantic, the essay by Alan G.
Macpherson on “Norse Voyages of Exploration” in John B. Hattendorf
(ed.-in-chief), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History (Oxford &
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Vol. 2, pp. 285-288, will fit the bill
very nicely. For those seeking a more detailed treatment, The Norse Atlantic Saga: Being the Norse Voyages of Discovery
and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, and North America (rev. ed.; New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986) by Gwyn Jones is recommended, although readers should consider reading Jones in conjunction with
English translations of the Norse sagas. The standard work here is The Vinland Sagas:
The Norse Discovery of America (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), translated and
introduced by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, but readers might first wish to
consult Eva Rode, "The Vinland sagas and their manuscripts," in Viking
Voyages to North America, ed. Birth L. Clausen, trans. Gillian Fellows Jenson
(Roskilde: The Viking Ship Museum, 1993), pp. 22-29. More recently, there is a set of
articles on Norse sagas and the Vinland adventure in William Fitzhugh and Elizabeth I.
Ward (eds.), Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 2000), a fine collection of authoritative essays by well-known
specialists, fully half of which concern themselves with the Norse expansion across the
North Atlantic. On the sagas, for instance, see: Haraldur Ólafsson, "Sagas of
Western Expansion," pp. 143-145; Gísli Sígurðsson, "An Introduction to the Vinland
Sagas," p. 218, including both the "Greenlanders Saga," pp.
219-221 and "Erik the Reds Saga," pp. 222-223; Birgitta Linderoth Wallace,
"An Archaeologists Interpretation of the Vinland Sagas," pp.
225-231; and Gísli Sigurðsson, "The Quest for Vinland in Saga Scholarship,"
pp. 232-237.

However, take care not to trust too
much in what the sagas appear to say. They were written centuries after the
events they allege to describe, and the two Vinland sagas are full of details
which are at best ambiguous, and more often contradictory. Any attempt to
reconcile saga details with the emerging archaeological record can only be done
by using those details selectively – emphasizing some and disregarding many
others. This point is driven home forcefully by Sverrir Jakobsson in “Vínland
and Wishful Thinking: Medieval and Modern Fantasies,” an essay which appeared in
Canadian Journal of History, XLVII: 3 (Winter 2012), pp. 493-514. While
Jakobsson does not disagree that the Norse made it as far as Newfoundland, he is
very reluctant to accept the reliability of the sagas as directional guides in
tracing where the Norse actually went in North America.

For that,
we must trust in the empirical evidence provided by other disciplines. For this
reason, most scholars are sensibly cautious in trying to place too much emphasis
on the question, where was Vinland? Instead, they focus on the discovery of the
Norse habitation site at L’Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s. While the initial
reaction was to conclude that the discovery provided powerful archaeological
support for the argument that Vinland was there, at the top of Newfoundland’s
Northern Peninsula, specialists today are unwilling to describe L’Anse aux
Meadows as anything more than a temporary or seasonal habitation site. Another
location – somewhere in the Gulf of St. Lawrence – may be more probable. In
fact, if Vinland did exist somewhere in North America, then the most likely
answer is that it may refer to a larger region, one that included but also
extended well beyond L’Anse aux Meadows. Thus, when confronted by the question
“Is L’Anse aux Meadows Vinland?,” the response of Birgitta Linderoth Wallace is
that “Vinland ... was not a specific site.” Rather, she explains, the correct
question to ask should be: “Is L’Anse aux Meadows one of the sites mentioned in
the Vinland sagas?” She is quite certain that this is indeed the case, and the
announcement in early 2016, that a second Norse site may have been found in
southwestern Newfoundland, near Codroy, has not only given validity to the
notion that the Norse did indeed extend their explorations deep into the Gulf of
St Lawrence, but has also re-energized both academic and public interest in the
Norse experience in Newfoundland. The site has not yet been incorporated into
the published literature on the Norse in North America but documentaries
co-produced by the BBC and PBS have resulted in on-line accounts at <http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35935725>
and <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160331-viking-discovery-north-america-canada-archaeology/>.

In short, most scholars agree that the
Norse did arrive in North America and that solid proof of that arrival can be
found in Newfoundland. At the moment the book
Westward Vikings: The Saga of L’Anse Aux Meadows (St. John’s: Historic
Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2006) is one of the better
publications on the topic. It is rich in photographs, diagrams, maps, and
figures, and provides a comprehensive, accessible yet scholarly account, not
only of the Norse habitation site at L’Anse aux Meadows, but also the North
Atlantic context of Norse expansion, discovery, settlement, society, interaction
with native peoples, and eventual abandonment of the Norse presence in North
America. Students seeking a briefer yet still compelling
analysis of the Norse experience in Newfoundland should seek out one or both of
two other publications, both available on-line and also written by Birgitta
Wallace: “The Norse in Newfoundland: L’Anse aux Meadows and Vinland,”
Newfoundland Studies XIX: 1 (Spring 2003; Special Issue on “The New Early
Modern Newfoundland: to 1730”): 5-43; and most recently “L’Anse Aux Meadows,
Leif Eriksson’s Home in Vinland,” an essay which appeared in a “Special Volume”
of the on-line Journal of the North Atlantic, II (2009-2010) that was
devoted to “Norse Greenland – Selected Papers from the Hvalsey Conference 2008”
– see pp. 114-125.

Despite the persuasive and scholarly merits of the
analysis by Wallace and others, arguments continue to be made for other
interpretations of the location of Vinland, some near, some far. Thus, Niels
Vinding puts together a nice synthesis of the available information about the
Norse voyages and concludes that Leif Eriksson landed in Trinity Bay, though he
accepts a more conventional location at L’Anse aux Meadows for Thorfinn
Karlsefni's voyage a few years later; see Niels Vinding; Birgitte Moyer-Vinding
(trans.), Viking Discovery of America, 985-1008: The Greenland Norse and
Their Voyages to Newfoundland (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, ON, Lampeter, UK:
Edwin Mellen, 2005). In The Wineland Millennium: Saga and Evidence
(Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 2000), Páll Bergþórsson argues for Quebec! In short,
the saga evidence remains ambiguous, just as Jakobsson warns. Ironically, this
means that the mystery of identifying the precise location of Vinland continues
to generate debate. Students can engage in this debate themselves, since both of
the “Vinland” sagas have been reprinted in conveniently facing pages (along with
a number of other sagas that do not concern Vinland) in The Sagas of
Icelanders: A Selection (New York: Viking, 2000), with a fine preface by
Jane Smiley and a very thorough introduction by Robert Kellogg. This collection
is one of several books published to capitalize on the millennium observations
in the year 2000 of the Norse arrival in North America.

The results of archeological
investigation are also now easily accessible to the student. The discovery and
confirmation of the Norse habitation site at L’Anse aux Meadows is described in
Helge Ingstad,Westward to Vinland;
The Discovery of Pre-Columbian Norse House-Sites in North America (Toronto: Macmillan,
1969). A more scholarly approach to the same topic is provided in Anne Stine Ingstad,
The
Discovery of a Norse Settlement in America, Vol. I: Excavations at L'Anse Aux Meadows,
Newfoundland, 1961-1968 and Helge Ingstad, The Discovery of America, Vol. II: The
Historical Background and the Evidence of the Norse Settlement Discovered in Newfoundland
(Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1985), but the recent publication of The Viking Discovery of America: The
Excavation of a Norse Settlement in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland by Helge Ingstad
and Anne Stine Ingstad (St. John's: Breakwater Press, 2000) provides a more accessible
treatment of the Ingstads discovery and work. Besides the publications by
Birgitta Wallace already mentioned, several additional articles by Wallace
provide excellent summaries of the nature of the Norse habitation at
LAnse aux Meadows and its relationship to the "Vinland" of the sagas; see
in particular "LAnse aux Meadows, the western outpost" in Viking
Voyages to North America, ed. Birth L. Clausen, trans. Gillian Fellows Jenson
(Roskilde: The Viking Ship Museum, 1993), pp. 30-42; "The Norse in the North
Atlantic" in Iona Bulgin (ed.), Cabot and His World Symposium June 1997: Papers
and Presentations (St. Johns: Newfoundland Historical Society, 1999), 29-47;
and "The Viking Settlement at LAnse aux Meadows," in Fitzhugh and Ward (eds.),
Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, pp. 208-216. All of Wallace’s
publications should perhaps be read
in conjunction with Plate 16 of the first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada
[hereafter HAC], "Norse Voyages and Settlement" by Alan Macpherson and
Brigitta Wallace, which graphically displays an excellent overview of Norse expansion in the
North Atlantic as well as the archaeology of L'Anse aux Meadows. Essays on
Leif Ericsson,
Bjarni
Herjólfsson, and
Thorfinn Karselfni all appear in the first volume of the
DCB.

The inability of the Norse to cling to their toehold in North
America seems, at first, a real puzzle. After all, the Norse had not only expanded across
the Atlantic but had established a colony in Greenland that would last half a millennium,
in what seemingly was a far more inhospitable environment than North America. Most
scholars today agree that the friction and hostility that developed between the Norse in
North America and the indigenous inhabitants (known to us only by the Norse word skraelings)
may have been the decisive factor. Precisely who these skraelings were may never be
determined with certainty, as D. Odess, S. Loring, and W.W. Fitzhugh explain in
"Skraeling: First Peoples of Helluland, Markland, and Vinland," in William
Fitzhugh and Elizabeth I. Ward (eds.), Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), pp. 193-205. Some suggest they were
Inuit. Others conclude that they
were Indian; see Robert McGhee "Contact Between Native North Americans and the
Medieval Norse: A Review of the Evidence," American Antiquity XLIX: 1
(January 1984): 4-26, McGhee’s more recent article, "The Skraelings of Vinland,"
in Viking Voyages to North America, ed. Birth L. Clausen, trans. Gillian
Fellows Jenson (Roskilde: The Viking Ship Museum, 1993), pp. 43-53, and Kevin
McAleese, "Skraelingar Abroad – Skraelingar at Home?," in Shannon
Lewis-Simpson (ed.), Vinland Revisited: The Norse World at the Turn of the
First Millennium (St. John’s: Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and
Labrador, 2003), 353-364. William Fitzhugh examines the factors behind, and the
cultural impact of, Inuit contact with the Norse as well as with the Basque and
sixteenth-century English explorers in “Early Contacts North of Newfoundland
Before A.D. 1600: A Review,” in William W. Fitzhugh (ed.), Cultures in
Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American Cultural
Institutions A.D. 1000-1800 (Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1985), pp. 23-43. A more recent essay on the same theme appears in
Chapter 5, “The Giving Tree,” of History in the Making: The Archaeology of
the Eastern Subarctic (Lanham, NJ: AltaMira Press of Rowman & Littlefield,
2013) by Donald H. Holly Jr..

Yet any understanding of
Norse failure to establish a more permanent foothold in North America requires
not only an awareness of cultural conflict, but also an appreciation of the
complexities of the Norse colony in Greenland – its society, economy, culture,
and its environment – for it was from there that the Norse tried – and failed –
to establish a foothold in North America. Towards this
end, readers might begin with Jette Arneborg, "Greenland, the starting-point for the
voyages to North America," in Viking Voyages to North America, ed. Birth L.
Clausen, trans. Gillian Fellows Jenson (Roskilde: The Viking Ship Museum, 1993), pp.
13-21. Next, one must recognize that the Norse settled in Greenland and Vinland at a time
when the North Atlantic climate was relatively mild; climatic degradation may have
contributed to the problems that the Norse subsequently experienced. See, for instance,
Knud Frydendahl, "The summer climate in the North Atlantic about the year 1000,"
in Birth L. Clausen (ed.), Gillian Fellows
Jenson (trans.), Viking Voyages to North America (Roskilde: The Viking Ship Museum, 1993), pp. 90-94, as well as Marek E. Jasinski and Frederik Srreide, "The Norse Settlements in Greenland from
a Maritime Perspective," in Shannon Lewis-Simpson
(ed.), Vinland Revisited: The Norse World at the Turn of the First Millennium
(St. John’s: Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003),123-132. Climatic deterioration,
together with social and economic developments within the Greenland colony as well as
ecological degradation, may all have combined to impair the ability of the Greenland Norse
to maintain contact with their discoveries in North America and, indeed, to their ability
to survive in Greenland itself.

Thomas H. McGovern has been a leading exponent of this
explanation, having first developed it in his doctoral dissertation, The Paleoeconomy
of Norse Greenland: Adaptation and Extinction in a Tightly Bounded Ecosystem (PhD
thesis, Columbia University, 1979), and reaffirmed it in subsequent publications,
including: "The Economics of extinction in Norse Greenland," in T.M.L. Wigley,
M.J. Ingram, and G. Farmer, Climate & History (Cambridge: CUP, 1981), pp.
404-33; "Northern Islands, Human Error, and Environmental Degradation: A View of
Social and Ecological Change in the Medieval North Atlantic," Human Ecology
XVI: 3 (1988): 225-270, which McGovern co-authored with Gerald Bigelow, Thomas Amorosi,
and David Russell; "The Demise of Norse Greenland," in Fitzhugh and Ward (eds.),
Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, pp. 327-339; and in "The Vinland Adventure:
A North Atlantic Perspective," North American Archaeologist II: 4 (1980/81):
285-308. This last essay not only provides a convincing case for Norse "strategic
overstretch" but also provides useful points of comparison with later, more
successful European experiences at overseas colonization. Environmental
degradation also plays an important part in Niels Lynnerup's argument, that the Norse in
Greenland never had a population sufficient to withstand the stresses of the later Middle
Ages; see his The Greenland Norse: A Biological-anthropological Study (Meddelelser
om Grønland "Man and Society" No. 24; Copenhagen: Danish Polar Center, 1998).
Finally, in the closing chapters of his book Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking Press, 2005), Jared M. Diamond uses the
Norse experience in Greenland to support his exploration of the factors that
caused some cultures and civilizations in the past to fall into ruin while
others thrived and prospered. Using primarily secondary sources, he maintains
that the Norse failed because as the Greenland climate deteriorated, they clung
to a maladapted cultural heritage to the end, while their Inuit neighbours
adapted and survived.

Yet the real story may be
much more complex than poor adaptive choices to deteriorating environmental
conditions. In a
recent essay, some of the earlier arguments about climatic deterioration and
environmental degradation are revisited. The authors (who include Tom McGovern)
suggest instead that changing economies and patterns of trade might instead have
critically marginalized the Norse Greenland settlements and effectively sealed
their fate. The demise of Norse Greenland might not be symptomatic of a failure
to adapt to environmental change, but rather "a consequence of successful wider
economic developments of Norse communities across the North Atlantic." Using data
not only from Greenland but also from the Faroe Islands and medieval Iceland,
the interplay of Norse society with climate, environment, settlement, and other
circumstances is analysed. Cumulative climate change certainly played its part,
but so apparently did long-term increases in vulnerability caused by economic
change. The result was "a cascading collapse of integrated interdependent
settlement systems, bringing the end of Norse Greenland"; see Andrew J.
Dugmore, Christian Keller, Thomas H. McGovern, "Norse Greenland Settlement:
Reflections on Climate Change, Trade, and the Contrasting Fates of Human
Settlements in the North Atlantic Islands," Arctic Anthropology XLIV: 1
(2007): 12-36. Several articles which
examine what the Greenland Norse ate and the significance of that diet towards
our understanding of their history have been published in a Special Issue of the
Journal of the North Atlantic, III (2011-2012), edited by T. Douglas
Price, on the theme “Viking Settlers of the North Atlantic: An Isotopic
Approach.”

Cumulative climate change seems therefore to have played an
important part on the demise of Norse Greenland. Important differences have been
confirmed in the timing of sea-ice expansion and storminess when comparing the
Western and Eastern Settlement regions. Essentially, the Western Settlement
experienced major climate deterioration by the first decades after AD 1200
whereas environmental conditions in the Eastern Settlement did not deteriorate
until later, around AD 1400. This suggests that living conditions in the Western
Settlement became less attractive shortly after 1200 due to the effects of the
early, regional climate deterioration, which in turn made the Western Settlement
probably increasingly dependent on supplies from the Eastern Settlement, where
milder climate conditions persisted for another century. Eventually, increased
summer blockage of the Eastern Settlement fjords by ice, beginning around AD
1400 would have imposed serious limitations to sailing and pasture productivity
in coastal areas and would have played a crucial role in the final demise of the
Eastern Settlement a few decades later. All this is examined in Jette Arneborg,
Tom McGovern, Georg Nyegaard (eds.), “Impact of Medieval Fjord Hydrography and
Climate on the Western and Eastern Settlements in Norse Greenland,” part of
Journal of the North Atlantic, Special Volume 6: In The Footsteps of
Vebæk-Vatnahverfi Studies 2005-2011 (2014).

How did Greenlanders respond to environmental change?
Not everyone agrees that the Norse colonies were simply died out. A provocative
challenge to the theory of environmental and climatic degradation and
maladaptation has been proposed by Kirsten A. Seaver in her book The Frozen Echo:
Greenland and the Exploration of North America ca. A.D. 1000-1500 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996) and, more recently, in
The Last Vikings: The Epic Story of the Great Norse Voyagers (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2010). Seaver synthesises a diversity of scholarly research about Norse
Greenland in order to develop the argument that the Norse colonies there did not fade out
until after 1500, and may have developed a thriving trade with Bristol merchants in (among
other things) stockfish. Seaver pushes her evidence hard in order to maintain that Bristol
contact with Greenland set the stage for English discovery of Newfoundland late in the
1400s; indeed, she has recently tempered her views somewhat in a paper entitled
"Norse Greenland on the Eve of Renaissance Exploration in the North Atlantic,"
in Anna Agnarsdóttir (ed.), Voyages and Explorations in the North Atlantic from the
Middle Ages to the XVIIth Century (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2000),
29-44. Nevertheless, Seaver continues to challenge those who argue that environmental factors
caused the Greenland colony to fade into extinction before the mid-1400s.

It does stand to reason, however, that if deteriorating
climate did begin to impair sea transportation and agriculture within the Norse
Greenland settlements then it would also have had a damaging effect on
Greenland’s essential commercial and cultural links with other parts of the
Norse Atlantic. Certainly some have argued that Greenland’s fate should be
linked to developments in Europe; see Jette Arneborg, "Greenland and Europe," in Fitzhugh
and Ward (eds.), Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, pp. 304-317, and Jón Th. Thór,
"Why Was Greenland Lost? Changes in North Atlantic Fisheries and Maritime
Trade in the Fourteenth and Fifteen Centuries," Scandinavian Economic History
Review XLVIII: 1 (2000): 28-39. Thór, for instance, suggests that the persistence and
well-being of the Greenland colony had depended on a thriving commercial connection with
Iceland. When Iceland turned to new maritime commercial opportunities such as the cod fish
trade with Europe during the late Middle Ages, the need to maintain a connection with Greenland faded, and so
did the colony there. This theme of the importance of trade in understanding the
history of the Greenland colony is also central to two articles appearing in the
on-line periodical, Journal of the North Atlantic. Guðmundur J.
Guðmundsson’s article “Greenland and the Wider World,” Journal of the North
Atlantic, II (2009-2010), “Special Volume: Norse Greenland – Selected
Papers from the Hvalsey Conference 2008,” 66-73, is all about the medieval
Greenland trade, emphasizing the colony’s export commodities and modes of
communication with other countries. Christian Keller’s essay, “Furs, Fish, and
Ivory: Medieval Norsemen at the Arctic Fringe,” Journal of the North
Atlantic, III, No. 1 (2010), 1-23, goes further, suggesting the Norse
colonization of Greenland was itself market driven, with walrus tusks as the
most successful export commodity at first, before being affected in the twelfth
century by the development in Norway and later Iceland of bulk trades in
commodities such as stockfish. Just how Greenland society was affected by this
development has not yet been determined, but Keller recommends that greater
attention needs to be given to Viking Age and Medieval cash and trade economies.

Still on the theme of trade, Else Roesdahl has looked very specifically at the
link in Greenland’s rise and decline to the rise and decline of the trade with
Europe in luxury commodities such as walrus ivory;
see
"Walrus ivory and other northern luxuries: their importance for Norse voyages
and settlements in Greenland and America," in Shannon Lewis-Simpson (ed.),
Vinland Revisited: The Norse World at the Turn of the First Millennium (St.
John’s: Historic Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003), 145-152
and “Walrus ivory – demand, supply, workshops, and Greenland,” in A. Mortensen
and S. Arge (eds.), Viking and Norse in the North Atlantic: Select Papers
from the Proceedings of the 14th Viking Congress (Tórshavn: Føroya
Fróðskaparfelag, 2005), 182-191. In “Norsemen and the North
America forests,” Journal of Forest History XXIV: 4 (October 1980), pp.
200-203, Oddvar K. Hoidal reminds us that three of the four Greenland Norse
voyages to North America described in the sagas returned with cargoes of lumber,
and that archaeological remains provide evidence that timber harvesting
continued well after the Vinland voyages came to an end. Whether Greenland
commerce with Iceland and other destinations included North American timber is
not so easily demonstrated.

One thing is
clear. If the fate of the
medieval Norse in the North Atlantic rested on their ability to maintain contact
with Europe, then consideration must also be given to the nature and quality of
Norse shipping as factors in the ability of the Greenland Norse to sustain that
contact or, for that matter, develop contact with North America. The sheer
diversity of destinations, underlying reasons for voyaging, seafaring
conditions, etc. meant that the Norse developed some fairly sophisticated and
specialized types of vessels. A fine introduction to the
topic is provided by Jan Bill’s entry on the “Viking Ship” in John B. Hattendorf
(ed.-in-chief), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History (Oxford &
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Vol. 2, pp. 288-290. Those who desire
more detailed information might turn to Andrew J. Dugmore, Andrew F.
Casely, Christian Keller, Thomas H. McGovern, "Conceptual Modelling of Seafaring,
Climate and Early European Exploration and Settlement of the North Atlantic
Islands," in Atholl Anderson, James Barrett, Katie Boyle (eds.), The Global
Origins and Development of Seafaring (Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, 2010), pp. 213-225. Readers should also consult:
G.J. Marcus, “The Evolution of the knörr,” The Mariner’s Mirror XLI: 2
(May 1955), pp. 115-122; Richard
Unger, "The Archaeology of
Boats: Ships of the Vikings," Archaeology XXXV: 3 (May/June 1982),
pp. 20-27;
Roald Morcken, "Longships, Knarrs and Cogs," The Mariner's Mirror LXXIV:
4 (November 1988): 391-400; Max Vinner, "Unnasigling  the
seaworthiness of the merchant vessel," in Birth L. Clausen (ed.), Gillian
Fellows Jenson (trans.), Viking Voyages to North America (Roskilde: The Viking Ship Museum, 1993),
pp. 95-108; or Arne Emil Christensen, "Ships and Navigation," in
William Fitzhugh and Elizabeth I. Ward (eds.), Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, pp. 86-97. The better to understand
the methods used to navigate such vessels about the North Atlantic, readers should examine
Thorsteinn Vilhjámsson’s contribution on “Norse Navigation” in John B.
Hattendorf (ed.-in-chief), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History
(Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Vol. 2, pp. 278-285, or "Navigation by the Vikings on the open sea" by Søren Thirslund in Viking
Voyages to North America, ed. Birth L. Clausen, trans. Gillian Fellows Jenson
(Roskilde: The Viking Ship Museum, 1993), pp. 109-117, or Douglas McNaughton, "A
World in Transition: Early Cartography of the North Atlantic," in Fitzhugh and Ward
(eds.), Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, pp. 257-269. And since any interpretation
of where the Norse voyagers actually went depends so much on properly understanding
the distances described in the saga records, students should also consult "Norse
Nautical Units and Distance Measurements" by Roald Morcken in The Mariners
Mirror LIV (1968): 393-401.

One
of the most controversial sources in recent years for understanding the Norse achievement
in crossing the North Atlantic during medieval times must surely be the so-called
"Vinland Map" which appears to provide cartographic confirmation that the Norse
reached North America. The "Vinland Map" was first discovered and published by
the Yale University Press in 1965; see R.A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston, and George D.
Painter, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1965). Immediately the map was denounced as a forgery, and the academic world
quickly divided into advocates either of its authenticity or its fraudulent nature. Even
Yale University withdrew its endorsement of the map for a while. However, new tests seemed
to provide strength for those who support its authenticity, and in 1995 Yale University
Press released a revised edition of the original work, with much new material.
Students can explore this historical controversy themselves through such essays as Robert
McGhee, "The Vinland Map: Hoax or History?", The Beaver LXVII: 2
(April/May 1987): 37-44, Max Vinner, "The mysterious Vinland map (»The Map that
Spoiled Columbus Day«)," in Viking Voyages to North America, ed. Birth L.
Clausen, trans. Gillian Fellows Jenson (Roskilde: The Viking Ship Museum, 1993), pp.
30-42, Kirsten A. Seaver, "The `Vinland Map': who made it, and why? New light on an
old controversy," The Map Collector, 70 (Spring 1995): 32-40,
as well as Seaver’s more recent essay, "The ‘Vinland Map’: Faith, Facts, and
Fables," in Shannon Lewis-Simpson (ed.), Vinland Revisited: The Norse World
at the Turn of the First Millennium (St. John’s: Historic Sites Association
of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003), 443-456. See also Stuart C.
Browns review essay on the new edition of The Vinland map and the Tartar Relation
in Newfoundland Studies XV: 1 (Spring 1999): 115-124.

Can a link be established between the Norse experience and that of
fifteenth-century European explorers? David B. Quinn considers, then dismisses, the
possibility that Christopher Columbus might have been influenced in his thinking by the
Norse experience while visiting Iceland during the 1470s; see his "Columbus and the
North: England, Iceland, and Ireland," William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser.,
XLIX: 2 (April 1992): 278-297; this article has since been reprinted, with a new appendix,
in David B. Quinn, European Approaches to North America, 1450-1640 (Aldershot &
Brookfield, VT: Variorum Press, 1998), 18-40. Peter Pope considers the question anew and arrives at essentially the same
conclusion in "Discovery and Memory: Zuan Caboto and the Norse in Newfoundland,"
ed. Anna Agnarsdóttir, Voyages and Explorations in the North Atlantic from the Middle
Ages to the XVIIth Century (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2000), pp. 45-60.
Like Quinn, any argument linking the Norse with explorers of the late fifteenth century is
speculative and, in fact, unnecessary; Cabot could easily have acquired an understanding
of the best route to take in crossing the North Atlantic without any knowledge of voyages
by his Norse predecessors. On the other hand, Seaver's Frozen Echo offers
provocative arguments that the Norse experience can indeed be directly linked to
fifteenth-century British ventures into the North Atlantic, including voyages to North
America, while James Robert Enterline, a mathematician and computer consultant known for
his work in the history of cartography, argues not only that Renaissance explorers had
explicit fore-knowledge of earlier Norse voyages but that the basis for medieval maps of
areas in America which no European had yet reached (including the controversial Yale
Vinland Map) was provided by the Inuit who, he maintains, had competent cartographic
skills that enabled them to transmit information to the Norse that was eventually passed
on to later Europeans; see his Erikson, Eskimos, and Columbus: Medieval European
Knowledge of America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). It is an
argument that is certain to be controversial. At the very least, it demonstrates that the
question of who knew what and when and how will remain the focus for debate for a long
time to come.

The Fifteenth CenturyNevertheless, for
now at least the best available evidence supports the view of Quinn, Pope, and other
sceptics that it is unlikely that Columbus or Cabot were significantly influenced by the
residual legacy of Norse voyages. While this may seem a disappointingly safe position, it
is one that reinforces the conclusion that the historical significance of the Norse
voyages must be sought in the lessons to
be learned from their failure to effect a successful settlement of the New World, not in
their success in getting there. Subsequent
European discoveries leading to the permanent exploitation and occupation of Newfoundland
are summarized in George MacBeath's succinct but thorough essay on "The Atlantic
Region" in
the
DCB, I: 21-6. This volume of the DCB also includes entries
on all the significant explorers, including
John Cabot and his son Sebastian, the
Portuguese explorers
João Fernandes,
Gaspar Corte-Real and his brother
Miguel, and the
French explorer
Jacques Cartier. A more recent essay that assesses the significance of
early voyages to subsequent discoveries is entitled "From Cabot to Cartier: The Early
Exploration of Eastern North America, 1497-1543." Written by John L. Allen, it
appeared in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, LXXXII: 3(September
1992): 500-521. David Quinn has considered why it was that many years often passed between
the time that Europeans discovered Newfoundland and other parts of North America and the
time that they moved aggressively to establish a permanent presence in the newly
discovered lands; see his ""North America: A Last Resort?", first published
in Storia Nord Americana 4 (Turin, 1987), pp. 31-40 and since reprinted in David B.
Quinn, European Approaches to North America, 1450-1640 (Aldershot & Brookfield,
VT: Variorum Press, 1998), pp.221-230. Quinn has also edited, with introductions, the
written legacy of many of the early explorers in Newfoundland waters in the first volume
of his invaluable collection of documents, New American World; A Documentary History of
North America to 1612 (5 volumes; New York: Arno Press, 1979). As well, many libraries
hold Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of
the English Nation (12 vols.; Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1903-05), of which
the second volume is most useful for Newfoundland history. These documents should be used
in conjunction with Plate 19, "Exploring the Atlantic Coast," of the HAC,
vol. I.

The English port city of Bristol
played a prominent role in the re-discovery of Newfoundland, and much attention
has therefore been given to that port-city’s activities, not only at the time of
Cabot’s historic voyage but during the decades before. Two very useful starting
points in reading about this aspect of Newfoundland history would be Patrick
McGrath, "Bristol and America 1480-1631," in Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P.
Canny, and P.E.H. Hair (eds.), The Westward Enterprise, English Activities in
Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480-1650 (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1979), pp. 81-102, and A.N. Ryan, "Bristol, The Atlantic and
North America, 1480-1509," in John Hattendorf (ed.), Maritime History, Vol.
I: The Age of Discovery (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1996), pp. 241-255.
Unfortunately this perfectly sensible search for the context of Cabot’s voyages
has led to some rather unfortunate tendencies to make unjustified claims about
those activities.

The conventional view of this process
assumes that Bristol commercial interests may have found Newfoundland several
years before John Cabot’s famous voyage of "discovery" but kept the information
a secret in order to capitalize on the rich fishing grounds. David Beers Quinn
tries to make the case in "The Argument for the English Discovery of America
Between 1480 and 1494," Geographical Journal CXXVII (1961), pp. 277-85;
this essay was revised and reprinted in J.M. Bumsted (ed.), Canadian History
Before Confederation (Georgetown: Irwin-Dorsey, 1972), pp. 18-30 (2nd ed.,
1979, pp. 17-28).And it is a view that has been reiterated in as recent a publication
as British Maritime Enterprise in the New World: From the Late Fifteenth to
the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Lewiston, NY and Queenston, ON: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1999); see especially "Part 2, North America: Chapter 1, 'The First
Explorers, 1480-1547'." It is certainly true that there is evidence of voyages,
perhaps even of discovery, of a place called Brasil, or Hy-Brasil or O’Brazil (a
name of Gaelic origin, meaning "Isle of the Blest"). It was a mythical island
that appeared on many sea charts from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries.
Late in the fifteenth century there were suggestions that Bristol venturers had
found the island, only to lose the location, lending support to the idea that Bristol
exploration of the North Atlantic in the 1480s and 1490s was therefore driven by a search
to re-discover the place. Harvey L. Sharrer and more recently Evan T. Jones have
examined some of the documentation on which these claims were based; see their
discussion of the Spanish Basque Lope Garcia de Salazar’s "account of Bristol’s
discovery of the Island of Brasil (pre 1476)" at: <http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Maritime/Sources/1476brasil.htm>.

In other words, Bristol’s involvement
in voyages of explorations in the North Atlantic should not be dismissed. It
does, however, appear as though a more subtle explanation is needed – one that
places Bristol merchants more firmly within a European political and commercial
contact. For instance, in The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic
Economy, 1450-1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), a
magisterial study of Bristol before the eighteenth century by David H. Sacks,
the Newfoundland fishery and trade are given only passing mention. Sacks’
analysis suggest that the conventional view should be re-visited (a point that
will be made at greater length later, when discussing English involvement in the
Newfoundland fishery in the sixteenth century). He offers some insightful
observations about the disruptive effect that England’s loss of Bordeaux to
France in 1453, at the end of the Hundred Years’ War, had on the mainstay of the
medieval Bristol economy, namely the trade in English woolens for the wines of
Gascony. Sacks maintains that this plunged Bristol to its lowest economic ebb,
and may provide a better clue as to why Bristol merchants were willing to
speculate in Atlantic explorations in the late 1400s. Bristol was a city of
merchants, not of fishermen. They hoped to discover and develop new
opportunities for trade. This point is affirmed in a perceptive
Master’s dissertation by Annabel Peacock. She focuses her attention on several
Bristol merchants who may have invested in Cabot’s voyages and who definitely
engaged in maritime trade as part of Bristol’s extensive Atlantic commercial
network. See The Men of Bristol and the Atlantic Discovery Voyages of the
Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (MA dissertation, Bristol, 2007;
available on the nternet at
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Maritime/Sources/2007mapeacock.htm).

So did Bristol
voyages into the Atlantic before 1497 lead to a discovery of Newfoundland before
Cabot? The late Alwyn Ruddock apparently did, though she passed away before she
could publish the basis for this conclusion (for more on
this, see below in discussion of the documentation for the Cabot voyages). David Quinn also maintained that Bristol merchants made it to
Newfoundland before Cabot; see his previously mentioned "The Argument for the
English Discovery of America Between 1480 and 1494." He later recapitulated
his evidence for a pre-Cabot Bristol discovery of Newfoundland in
the course of his evaluation of Columbus’ purported visit to Iceland in the
1470s; see his aforementioned "Columbus and the North: England, Iceland, and
Ireland," William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XLIX: 2 (April
1992): 278-297. The most recent advocate for a connection between
the Norse experience in Greenland and North America and Bristol awareness of the
fishing grounds at Newfoundland before Cabot is made by Kirsten Seaver in The
Frozen Echo. Yet, in the end, both Quinn and Seaver make their cases only by
avoiding the fact that Bristol did not play a commanding role in the European
fishing industry before 1497, or in the British fishery in Newfoundland after
1497. Susan Rose is openly
sceptical that English mariners generally, and Bristol in particular, had the
skills or the incentive to engage in deep-sea navigation before 1500, and
concludes that it is "very unlikely that covert voyages between Bristol and
Newfoundland had been in progress since 1490 or even earlier." See Susan Rose, "English
seamanship and the Atlantic crossing c.1480-1500: was the crossing of the
Atlantic beyond the capabilities of English seamen in the second half of the
fifteenth century?," Journal for Maritime Research (September 2002).
And given Bristol’s commitment to commerce rather than to the production
of fish before 1497, as well as the surprisingly modest profile of the English
fishery at Newfoundland after 1497, it seems reasonable to assume that Bristol’s
role in pre-Cabot development of trans-Atlantic fishing grounds can easily be
over-stated or at least misunderstood. In short, the available evidence suggests
that no definite conclusion about Bristol's "pre-Cabot" knowledge of the
Newfoundland fishery is possible.

Cabot

Which brings us to the voyages of John
Cabot. Curiously, there has been surprisingly little scholarly work written
about Cabot himself until recently. An obvious start point is the biographical essay by R.A. Skelton
on John Cabot in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. I: 1000-1700
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), pp. 146-52 (DCB).
There is also some tantalizing documentation about Cabot’s life before he came
to England. For instance, the Spanish historian Juan Gil discovered and
published some documents relating to John Cabot’s time in Seville in 1493-1494
where he proposed, was contracted to build, and then spent five months working
on, the construction of a stone bridge over the Guadalquivir River. The
documents cast Cabot as something of a promoter whose chief quality was probably
salesmanship. The documents have since been translated into English by Isobel
Birden and published on-line, with commentary by Birden and Evan T. Jones, at <http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Maritime/Sources/1494cabotseville.htm>.
Douglas Hunter maintains that Columbus and Cabot were more than just aware of
each other’s activities and that not only were their lives “surprisingly
intertwined” but that their explorations were in competition with each other;
see Douglas Hunter, The Race to the New World: Christopher Columbus, John
Cabot, and a Lost History of Discovery (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011). Francese
Albardaner i Llorens has suggested that Cabot was not a seaman at all and
succeeded only because the members of his crew were. Albardaner i Llorens claims
that in contrast, Columbus was Catalan and an accomplished seaman; see “John
Cabot and Christopher Columbus Revisited,” The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du
nord X: 3 (July 2000): 91-102.

About the Cabot
voyages themselves there is also very little documentation, at least compared to
that for other explorers. What little there is was first compiled in James A.
Williamson (ed.), Voyages of the Cabots and the English Discovery of North
America Under Henry VII and Henry VIII (Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, No.
120; Cambridge: At the University Press, 1962). More recently, the first volume
of New American World; A Documentary History of North America to 1612 (5
volumes; New York: Arno Press, 1979) by David B. Quinn (ed.), sub-titled
America from Concept to Discovery. Early Exploration of North America,
includes most of the available documentation on voyages of the Norse, St.
Brendan, Madoc, in the late 1400s (including the Bristol voyages in the 1480s),
as well as by John and Sebastian Cabot. The late Alwyn Ruddock had worked for
years researching what was certain to have become the definitive treatment of
John Cabot, but died before her work could be published. Annabel Peacock
examined Ruddock’s research and scholarly legacy in her MA dissertation, The
Men of Bristol and the Atlantic Discovery Voyages of the Fifteenth and Early
Sixteenth Centuries (MA dissertation, Bristol, 2007; available on the
Internet at <http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/Maritime/Sources/2007mapeacock.htm>).
More
on Ruddock’s research and scholarly legacy has been published by Evan T. Jones in "Alwyn Ruddock: ‘John Cabot
and the Discovery of America’," Historical Research LXXXI: 212 (May 2008), pp. 224-254
Bristol, 2007, as well as in “Bristol, Cabot and the New
Found Land, 1496-1500,” in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson,
Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in
New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press,
2013), pp. 25-34. Indeed, Jones’ investigations into Dr. Ruddock’s research
claims led to the establishment in 2009 of the
Cabot Project at
Bristol University, accessible on-line.
This is an international and collaborative project set up to investigate the
Bristol discovery voyages of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries –
in particular, those undertaken by John Cabot. In
short, there has been a considerable degree of
scholarly attention given to Cabot over the past twenty years, thanks in no
small measure to the attention given to him in 1997 on the occasion of the 500th
anniversary of his voyage to the “new found land.”

But where was
this new found land? Where did Cabot and his crew make landfall in the
Matthew? Because the documentary record is so thin, the answer to these
questions is wide open to interpretation. One of the better analyses of the 1497
voyage is that by Samuel Eliot Morison in his European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages; another
is "The Voyages of John Cabot," a chapter in Roger Morris, Atlantic
Seafaring: Ten Centuries of Exploration and Trade in the North Atlantic
(Camden, ME: International Marine Publishing, 1992). Ian Wilson's John Cabot and the Matthew (Tiverton: Redcliffe Press and St. John's:
Breakwater Press, 1996) and Alan Williams' John Cabot and Newfoundland (St. John's:
Newfoundland Historical Society, 1996) are slim booklets intended for a general audience.
They offer somewhat divergent interpretations of Cabot's route, yet manage to summarize
the essential details well and are suitably cautious in their overall assessments.
Two others, written with sensible restraint and academic caution,
offer quite
different conclusions: In "On John Cabot – An Hypothesis," Argonauta: The
Newsletter of the Canadian Nautical Research Society XVI: 1 (January 1999):
17-32, Trevor Kenchington proposes that Cabot made landfall somewhere on the
coast between Bonavista and Twillingate; in John Cabot and the Voyage of the
Matthew (Halifax: Formac Publishing, 1997), Brian Cuthbertson presents a
case for a Cape Breton Island landfall.

One of the most appealing books to come out of the 500th anniversary celebrations of
Cabot's voyage, at least in terms of illustrations, is Peter Firstbrook, The Voyage of
the Matthew: John Cabot and the Discovery of North America (London: BBC Books, 1997).
Though aimed at a general audience, it endeavours to set the context for Cabot's voyages.
The focus is very much on maritime trade and shipping generally, and on the Matthew
(both the original and the replica built for 1997). The book offers sensibly cautious
conclusions about Cabot's landfall, but regards the Bonavista landfall as the least likely
of the several candidates. Students will also find Lloyd Edward Kermode, "The Spirit
of Adventure: John Cabot, the merchants of Bristol and the re-discovery of America," The
Beaver LXXVI: 5(October/ November 1996): 4-11 a convenient if conventional account; it
conforms to Morison's interpretation. A more compelling study of the
relationship between Cabot and the Bristol merchants who invested in his voyage
appears in Evan T. Jones, “The Matthew of Bristol and the financiers of
John Cabot’s 1497 voyage to North America,” English Historical Review,
CXXI: 492 (June 2006): 778-795. Taking as his point of departure the obvious
fact that Cabot’s ship was small for its trans-Atlantic exploratory role, Jones
suggests that this in fact made perfect sense, that Cabot’s Bristol backers
would have selected the least-costly vessel capable of doing the job without
incurring too much financial risk. Jones concludes that if we are to understand
Cabot and his voyage, we must focus more than historians have to this point on
the Bristol merchant community. It is a point that Jones
reaffirms in "Henry VII and the Bristol expeditions to North America: the Condon
documents," Historical Research ("Early view" on-line, August 2009 <http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122579649/PDFSTART>.
Of course, if your interest is more in Cabot’s
ship than in Cabot himself or the voyage, then you should seek out "The Naval Architecture of the Matthew" by Colin
Mudie, the distinguished naval architect involved in the design and construction of the Matthew
replica which figured so prominently in 1997 in the re-enactment of Cabot's voyage; the
essay leads off Cabot and His World Symposium June 1997: Papers and Presentations
(St. John's: Newfoundland Historical Society, 1999), ed. Iona Bulgin, pp. 1-6.

Unfortunately yet perhaps predictably, n
dictably, the
1997 quincentennial of Cabot's voyage on the Matthew triggered a revival of interest in Cabot, though much of it
is of questionable quality. One of the weakest is Bernard D. Fardy, John Cabot: The
Discovery of Newfoundland (St. John's: Creative, 1994); it should definitely
be avoided. Another book, Away Beyond the Virgin Rocks: A Tribute to
John Cabot (St. John's, NF: Creative Publishers, 1997) by John Parsons, is an exercise
in antiquarianism. Parsons has read an extensive array of secondary sources, testing them
against the very limited and highly ambiguous primary evidence in order to argue that
Cabot made landfall on the coast of Maine. His mastery of the Cabot literature of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is impressive, but he goes to extremes in
building his case, ridiculing the ideas of others and at times dismissing their arguments
without evidence while presenting questionable, even contradictory claims of his own. Too
often, his grasp of the social, economic or cultural context of the Cabot voyages is weak.
This has not dissuaded him from writing another book on Cabot, On the Way to Cipango:
John Cabot's Voyage of 1498 (St. John's, NF: Creative Publishers, 1998). This focuses
on the 1498 voyage in which Cabot disappeared; with almost no evidence to support his
argument, Parsons argues that Cabot made it to the Caribbean before falling afoul of a
Spanish pirate, a theory others have supported with equal conviction and lack of evidence.

Finally, a
brief but useful summary of all the main points about the Cabot voyage is provided in a
review essay by David Quinn on "John Cabot and the 1497 Voyage to Newfoundland,"
Newfoundland Studies XV: 1 (Spring 1999): 104-110. Quinns little essay reviews, in part, what is unquestionably
one of the best books to come out of the 1997 celebrations  but alas! too late to
exercise much restraint in the popular debates of that year. This is Peter Popes The
Many Landfalls of John Cabot (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
Inspired by Eric Hobsbawm and others, who have written on the way in which we reconstruct
the past to serve our own needs, Pope explains very clearly what we know about Cabot and
his voyages, what little we can conclude, and how very much we choose to assume despite
the lack of evidence. Pope looks not only at the hype generated in 1997 but also that of
1897, and shows both how and why so much of the debate surrounding Cabot's voyage 
the route he followed, where he made landfall, what he discovered  has been
subordinated to chauvinistic agenda rather than to scholarly enlightenment. Pope
subsequently presented a paper in which he reaffirms the view that Cabot followed a route
that led to a northerly landfall, adding that this northerly route places Cabot less in
the category of Renaissance ocean pioneer and more in the category of traditional medieval
North Atlantic venturer. Peter E. Pope, "Discovery and Memory: Zuan Caboto and the
Norse in Newfoundland," in Anna Agnarsdóttir (ed.), Voyages and Explorations in
the North Atlantic from the Middle Ages to the XVIIth Century (Reykjavík: University
of Iceland Press, 2000), pp. 45-60.

Many of Popes arguments were echoed by a number of the
papers presented at the "Cabot and His World" symposium in June 1997, sponsored
by the Newfoundland Historical Society and subsequently collected, edited, and published
by Iona Bulgin for the Society in a collection by the same title. I see no point in
devoting very much discussion to that volume here, beyond noting that it includes the
views of three scholars on Cabot's landfall which were originally presented at the
Symposium as part of a "Cabot Landfall" debate; Fabian O'Dea, Brian Cuthbertson
and Alan Williams argued for Cape Bonavista (85-91), Cape Breton Island (93-97), and the
tip of the Great Northern Peninsula (99-107) respectively, succeeding only in
demonstrating how elastic the evidence can be when trying to prove anything about Cabot.
Two other papers by Jim Hiller and Lara Maynard examine (with varying degrees of
scepticism and certainty) even more legendary local traditions  that Cabot died at
Grates Cove on his 1498 expedition (155-161) and that in 1497 Cabot landed at Flatrock,
just north of St. John's (163-8). The Cabot and His World collection also contains
some interesting papers that explore how Cabot evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as an icon of Canadian and Newfoundland patriotism; see Shane O'Dea, "Judge
Prowse and Bishop Howley: Cabot Tower and the Construction of Nationalism" (171-82),
Peter Pope, "Traditions of Invention, 1897: Columbus, Cartier and Cabot"
(183-97), and Roberto Perin, "Caboto as a Contested Ethnic Icon" (199-208).

From Cabot to CartierIf we turn our
attention away from the way in which exploration and discovery were co-opted by later
centuries and return to the explorers themselves, we shall see that Portuguese explorers
have also received relatively little scholarly treatment in English. One noteworthy
exception is Richard Goertz, "João Alvares Fagundes, Capitão de Terra Nova
{1521}," Canadian Ethnic Studies XXXIII: 2(1991): 117-128.
Gaspar and
Miguel
Corte-Real, who voyaged to Newfoundland waters at the turn of the sixteenth century, are
featured in two essays by L.-A. Vigneras in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography,
Vol. I, 235-236. As with Cabot, so too with the Portuguese, caution must be exercised when
one encounters the claims, frequently made by Portuguese writers, that the Corte-Reals
were preceded in Newfoundland waters by their countrymen by several decades. There is no
evidence that Europeans of any kind were present here before Cabot. Finally, before
leaving this subject entirely, let us not forget the explorations by the French generally,
and by Jacques Cartier in particular. An excellent survey of the context for French
activities in the North Atlantic is the essay by A.N. Ryan, "France and the Atlantic
in the sixteenth century," in John Hattendorf (ed.), Maritime History, Vol. I: The
Age of Discovery (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1996), pp. 279-297. See also the previously
mentioned work of Samuel E. Morison as well as Marcel Trudel's The Beginnings of New
France, 1524-1663 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973). Trudel also contributed
the thorough essay on
Cartier that appears in the DCBI, pp. 165-172. A special
issue of The Archivist XI: 1(January/February 1984) was also devoted to Cartier.

The importance of ship technology in these early voyages of exploration should not be
underemphasized. A good discussion of this point is provided in Ian Friel, "The
Three-Masted Ship and Atlantic Voyages," in Joyce Youings (ed.), Raleigh in
Exeter: Privateering and Colonisation in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1985), pp. 21-37. Two other useful discussions, not only of the importance of medieval
shipping developments but also of the importance to eventual trans-Atlantic commerce of
medieval maritime trading patterns, are contributions to a festschrift honouring
American historian Robert G. Albion; see Archibald R. Lewis, "The Medieval Background
of American Atlantic Maritime Development," pp. 18-39 and William A. Baker,
"Fishing Under Sail in the North Atlantic," pp. 40-75, both in Benjamin W.
Labaree (ed.), The Atlantic World of Robert G. Albion (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1975).

Navigational
techniques and technologies, including early charts and maps, were also important. David
Quinn provides a fine, succinct essay on "Maps of the Age of European
Exploration" in D. Buisseret (ed.), Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting
North American History Through Maps (Chicago and London, 1990), pp.41-65, an essay
that has since been reprinted in David B. Quinn, European Approaches to North America,
1450-1640 (Aldershot & Brookfield, VT: Variorum Press, 1998), pp.93-117. See also
Quinn's essay, "The Americas in the Rotz Atlas of 1542," in Emerson Baker et
al (eds.), American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture and Cartography in the Land of
Norumbega (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 37-59 and 320-323; Quinn
presents a clear account of the way in which cartographers reflected an increasingly
sophisticated and informed European perception of the nature of North America generally,
and of Newfoundland and its fishing grounds in particular. Like several other Quinn
articles, this essay has since been reprinted in David B. Quinn, European Approaches to
North America, 1450-1640 (Aldershot & Brookfield, VT: Variorum Press, 1998), pp.
69-92. And while it is easy to exaggerate or over-estimate the degree to which
trans-Atlantic voyagers relied on maps (oceanic fishing voyages were more likely
to depend on experience and route descriptions gleaned from the experience of
others), nevertheless, even in the sixteenth century the value of maps for
navigation was both recognized and applied; see Susan Rose, “Mathematics and the
Art of Navigation: The Advance of Scientific Seamanship in Elizabethan England,”
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. XIV
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 175-184.